For my first post, I’m using the story that started this project off, though this is really not directly related to most of what I’ve written since. Same “world” though. Enjoy!
No one was certain who first made the connection that many of the residents of Berkshire Commons, those who had been tested at least, would die of FIRE or HEAT or some variation of INFERNO. A Diagnosis was a private thing, not something to be shared, particularly if it dealt in DISASTER or PLAGUE. Just as a fortune cookie’s power only proved true when convivially shared over moo shu pork and good spirits, so those who held a particularly ominous Diagnosis hoped the reverse applied: a secret kept was a fate deferred. But once the similarities amongst the neighbors became clear, it was all anyone would ever talk about – in the washing room, in the elevator, collecting their mail.
“What was yours?” a neighbor would ask and, getting the inevitable reply, nod grimly. “The walls seem so sturdy,” the neighbor would say, pounding his or her fist on the cinderblock wall above the dryer. “Just doesn’t seem like this building could BURN.”
Then, still muttering, the neighbor would measure out detergent or fabric softener and go about his or her laundry, forgetting momentarily the horrifying fate that was promised them all.
In the elevator, the awkward silences as previously distant neighbors stared at the slowly ascending lights eased with knowledge of a shared fate. Sometimes a neighbor would simply say, “You too?” and the other would nod in silent affirmation of kinship.
There was a meeting of the Homeowners’ Association and it was decided that a letter would be drafted to the Property Manager. The secretary of the Homeowners’ Association even went to the copy shop and had a packet of Diagnoses collated in an attractive booklet to accompany the missive:
Dear Sirs,
Given the broad occurrence of death by means of FIRE and/or FLAME by the residents of your building, it seems a prudent decision to employ any and all state-of-the-art fire-retardant devices and/or materials in any future rehabilitation of the building along with the present installation of fire alert and control devices forthwith. We would very much appreciate your compliance with this request at the earliest possible date.
Sincerely,
The Residents of Berkshire Commons
The Property Manager hemmed and hawed a bit but after speaking with the company’s lawyers and insurers, who informed them that the Diagnosis Clause could possibly apply in this scenario (that is, the insurance company was not liable for damages the Property Manager had reasonable foreknowledge of), the Property Manager took action. He installed smoke detectors on every floor along with fire extinguishers in the hallways and even, when time came to repaint the halls, used a newly developed fire-resistant paint that the makers claimed could actually repel and suffocate a fire before it had a chance to spread.
These improvements satisfied many of the tenants, though not all. Most of the renters moved out when their leases expired, but this was a small percentage of tenants as it was a point of pride that most inhabitants of Berkshire Commons owned their condos. Nevertheless, everybody went back about their business and forgot the supposedly forthcoming fire except to chide other inhabitants of the building who still smoked cigarettes. The Homeowners’ Association issued a directive that banned the use of barbecue grills on the building’s many porches – a great selling point. Barbecues could still be held in the common lawn area, however, and the prohibition on individual barbecues simply served to enhance the renewed community spirit of the building. Neighbors found that cooking burgers and chicken with each other was more fun than doing so with family members they had already talked to a million times.
It was at one of these community events that Janice McKendrick, 12B, admitted between bites of her hotdog that she had yet to be tested. “What?” came the incredulous reply. “I just figured it would be FIRE,” Janice said, dabbing at mustard on the corner of her lips with a napkin. “What’s the point?”
Billy Jensen, 6F – Bob Jensen’s young son – hadn’t been tested either. Neither had Nora Jackson, 11E; Steve Probert, 7D; or either of the Farnsworths, 6A, who spent half the year at the shore.
“What if it isn’t FIRE?” asked a neighbor. “Maybe we can beat the prediction, maybe things have changed?” Though everyone knew the predictions never changed and were never wrong. But, given the new information, the Homeowners’ Association decided when a Collector came back through town, they would hire him for the day and everybody in the building who hadn’t been tested could, and would, undergo the process. If they couldn’t escape the ultimate fate, perhaps they could alter its manner.
The Collector set up the Machine in the lobby on a folding table the superintendent dug out of the basement. In the past it had been used for Selden Peachmaker 2G’s Voter Registration Drive and Bonnie MacNamara 11B’s Global Warning Awareness Week, until the Homeowners’ Association made a prohibition against that as well, much to Bonnie’s chagrin. “Fucking Fascists,” she’d said to her husband Frank, who unfailingly, and secretly, voted Conservative.
The Collector looked like he could have been seven hundred years old and wore a dusty grey suit that was threadbare around the collar and joints. His deep black eyes swam in the hollow caverns of his face. His nose was sharp and thin like a knife that came to a point above his lips, dry blue lines on his pancaked white face. Like all Collectors, he wore rouge on his cheeks. His Diagnostic Device looked almost as old as the man, like a meat-grinder from the Middle Ages. Rusty joints held bulbs of softly pulsing metal, the machine’s openings akin to a human digestive system: a pleading mouth sucking fate and excreting prophecy. A strange smell grew pronounced in the lobby too, a thick stench like blood and copper. None of the neighbors could say if the Device or its operator was responsible.
“How come they haven’t updated these things?” asked one neighbor, wrinkling his nose as he looked askance at the strange metal contraption on the beige plastic table. “Or that guy,” another responded under her breath. “He gives me the willies.”
“They have to make them all the same,” said the tall, well-coiffed divorcé Bruce Donaldson, 6C, happy to share his knowledge of the Devices. His pungent aftershave tempered the coppery smell with a hint of cinnamon for the neighbors in close proximity. “Something about the integrity of the results. They tried to computerize it, but it just didn’t work anymore. As far as the Collectors, the same guys – always guys – have been operating the Devices since they were first invented. Most of them are as old as dirt. I heard they were going to start training new operators, but I guess for some reason they haven’t. Probably some union bullshit.”
Janice McKendrick, the tennis-playing, perky mother-of-two who had yet to be tested and stood first in line, nodded at Bruce and swallowed loudly.
“Don’t be scared,” he said, smiling, eyes fixed on the drooping V-neck of her unbuttoned polo shirt. “I know it seems like a lot of blood but I’m sure you’ve got plenty.”
Janice stepped up to the table and the Collector slowly raised his head from its position of reverence to the Device, extending a long, thin finger toward the box of vials that rested on the table alongside an antique silver knife with a bronze-and-leather handle.
“What about this knife?” she asked. Bruce just grinned again and said, “It’s all part of the tradition.”
Janice picked up the knife. It was even heavier than she’d thought it would be and she held it shakily. The Collector looked on impassively; such delays did not concern him, but others in line grew fidgety.
“Get on with it already, we’re waiting back here!” called a neighbor nobody liked from the back of the queue.
“It’s okay,” Bruce encouraged her, then glared at the man behind him. “Take your time.” Janice looked down at the knife in her hand, at the two dancing wolves etched onto the base of the blade. “Bruce, can you do it for me?” she asked meekly.
“Nope,” Bruce replied, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “That’s part of the tradition too.”
Janice was braver than she let on and merely shrugged. “Okay then, here goes nothing,” she said, before making a long slit across her palm. She held her hand out, extending and stretching one finger after the other, and watched the blood collect in the vial. The Collector, almost invisible in his immobility before, seemed to awaken from his somber trance, his eyes shining at the sight of Janice’s dripping blood. Seeing his glinting eyes, so alive for the first time, Janice shuddered and grabbed a paper towel from the table to staunch the wound.
“That enough?” she asked as the Collector eagerly grasped the vial from where Janice had placed it on the table. He held it before his eyes, seeming to calculate the exact number of milliliters she had provided. Days later, Bobby Jo Wood, 12C, standing in the corner of the lobby behind the Collector, swore she saw his dark tongue flick out and retrieve a stray drop from the lip of the vial.
After measuring the blood with his eyes, and, according to Bobby Jo at least, tasting of Janice, the Collector nodded ever so slightly and unlatched the hinged metal top of the funnel that led down into the guts of the Device. Slowly, with absolute precision, he poured Janice’s blood into the funnel while turning the crank that stuck, like a Jack-in-the-box, out of the machine’s side. The crank needed grease and creaked eerily with each rotation.
The process altogether couldn’t have taken much more than thirty seconds, but seemed longer given the Device’s noise and the expectant silence of the neighbors. When the yellowed scrap of paper wormed its way out of the front orifice, some of the more dramatic neighbors gasped.
Janice’s quivering hand reached out to grab the slip, but paused; she turned her head and looked again at Bruce. “Go ahead,” he quietly mouthed, eyes twinkling. Janice took the slip and, holding it with both hands, looked down at the Diagnosis with a puzzled expression.
“Well,” shouted one anxious neighbor from the back, “what’s it say?”
“Is it FIRE?’ asked another.
Janice shook her head and frowned. “No, it’s not FIRE,” she said quietly.
Bruce intervened, his impatience winning out, and moved behind Janice to peer over her shoulder at the slip in her hands, flouting Diagnosis decorum and receiving a disdainful look from the Collector in the process.
“STEPS?” he said.
“STEPS,” she replied.
The neighbors sighed.
“STEPS is good,” a neighbor shouted out, relived that not everyone in the building would perish in the INFERNO. Maybe there wouldn’t be an INFERNO at all. “STEPS is old,” he continued. “Lots of old ladies die falling down steps, right? I mean, it’s not the greatest way to go, but it’s better than some.”
“Don’t forget, building’s got an elevator,” one neighbor added brightly.
Other neighbors nodded and grunted in agreement. STEPS wasn’t bad, and at least it wasn’t FIRE.
The spirit of the residents of Berkshire Commons improved more over the course of the day. Only one of the newly tested neighbors received anything approximating death by FIRE or HEAT, and his was FRY, which could just have meant he ate too much fatty food. Curiously, however, many of the new Diagnoses shared a commonality similar, though perhaps inverse, to those already held by so many residents of Berkshire Commons.
Billy Jensen, Bob’s son, was first to receive word of the other emerging theme. WINTER, his Diagnosis read.
“Hmmm,” Bob said upon reading his son’s Diagnosis. “WINTER, that’s a strange one.”
Billy was scared by his father’s lack of certainty, but more so by the prospect of freezing to death at some later date. “I don’t want to freeze, Dad,” Billy said as he started crying. “I’d rather BURN like you.”
“No, no,” said Jack Johnson, 7F, as he grabbed Billy by the shoulder, eliciting a cold look from Bob. “WINTER’s good, Billy. WINTER’s good. It’s like a metaphor, you know? You know what a metaphor is, Billy?”
Billy looked at Jack tearfully, snot bubbling from his nose. “Like something that means something else,” he whined.
“Exactly,” said Jack. “Something that means something else. And in this case, something good! WINTER is old age, Billy! All the great poets know this.”
Bob softened toward Jack for his quick-witted compassion, despite his insistence on revving his motorbike outside the building at all hours of the night and occasionally hosting questionable guests of the platinum-blonde, fake-breasted variety. “Yes, son,” Bob said, patting Billy on the back. “Jack’s right. WINTER’s good.”
There were other variations of COLD, plus one DARKNESS and a DUST, but, while scary, they were equally vague and could be rationalized in several different ways – from old age to disease contracted in old age to losing one’s sight in old age and falling down the STAIRS, much how Janice McKendrick explained her Diagnosis. Most importantly, they weren’t FIRE, so when the Collector packed up his Device and moved on to the next town, the tenants of Berkshire Commons relaxed and went about their lives: school and work and barbecues and making babies.
Around the same time, fresh trouble started. Most of the neighbors figured Janice McKendrick and Bruce Donaldson were having an affair – it was obvious from the way they looked at each other or conveniently found themselves doing laundry at the same time. Even greater evidence arose from James McKendrick’s sudden depression. Never the friendliest of neighbors, James now could barely be trusted to bring a six-pack to the weekly barbecue and volleyball tournament, if he showed up at all. But Janice and Bruce were sure to attend and, while their friendly conversations appeared harmless, it wasn’t hard to see they were falling in love.
Bruce and Janice at the organic co-op, Bruce and Janice at the flower show – the two grew inseparable. Worse yet for James McKendrick, his children Jacqueline and Jeremy also seemed to take a shine to Bruce. Neighbors saw Bruce and Jeremy kicking the soccer ball around, Bruce helping Jacqueline with her homework on the picnic benches near the barbecue pit. James, of course, noticed too. Yet when he confronted his wife about the fact that she, and their children even, seemed to be spending so much time with this strange man Bruce from 6C, his wife called him a jealous fool.
“Don’t you trust me?” she asked. “We have two beautiful children, a full life together, a beautiful condo, and still you don’t trust me. He just got divorced, James. He misses his kids, that’s all. You should be happy Jeremy finally has someone to play soccer with.”
These last words stung James. He had never been much of an athlete and, years before, had even resented the other boys at school who were fond of sports. James had spent his teenage years winning the regional science fair and turned his success into an advanced degree in chemical engineering and a supervisory position at a nearby genetics laboratory. That he chose to marry Janice who, in her youth, had been a tennis player of some renown, despite a lack of surface compatibility, was not terribly difficult to understand.
A few weeks after their heated conversation – weeks filled with the slow usurpation of his role as a husband and a father by the sweet-smelling Bruce – James McKendrick woke from a fitful night’s sleep. He had dreamed of a long line of prophets dressed in white robes walking through the desert under a hot sun. The strange figures marched single file from a past of ash and smoke toward a mountain that met a red sky. With primordial certainty, James knew that below the mountain there ran a river of blood. Lying alone in bed – Janice was already up, hitting tennis balls in the courts behind Berkshire Commons – he could smell the dry air of the desert, feel the sand beneath his feet. His heart yearned for the mountain; his lungs strained as he breathed in the waves of heat. James knew he must reach the mountain.
He slowly became conscious that the mountain he longed for was only a dream, that he remained in bed staring at a dresser strewn with cosmetics. Janice’s sports bra was carelessly thrown over the small television set also on the dresser. The proof of his life hung on the walls in vacation and wedding pictures in cheap aluminum frames that Janice purchased at Glorious Containers. Janice’s stacks of fitness magazines lay under the coffee table, her twenty-year-old tennis trophies clogged the mantle, and his children Jeremy and Jacqueline’s mediocre report cards were magnetized to the refrigerator. At the painful moment of full awareness that he was awake and far from the red mountain, James McKendrick decided to poison his wife.
And so he did: with a discrete chemical addition to each morning’s bowl of shredded wheat that created and expanded a small hole in her aorta, until one afternoon she collapsed on an elliptical machine in the Berkshire Commons community exercise room. Chest and face flushed pink and beaded with sweat, she lay on the carpeted floor, a trickle of drool running from the corner of her lips. A quick-thinking Nora Jackson rushed over from her nearby treadmill and attempted to resuscitate Janice – Nora had taken advantage of the previous year’s Friends of Berkshire Emergency CPR Seminar – but it was too late. Janice McKendrick, age thirty-six, mother of two, lover of one, was dead of a heart attack.
The residents of Berkshire Commons were stunned by Janice’s untimely death and uniformly disgusted with the literalness of her Diagnosis.
“That just ain’t right,” said the mailman to a neighbor upon hearing the news. “STEPS is elderly-like, you know? Not some freakin’ exercise machine.” He shook his head wistfully and handed the neighbor her mail. “New Glorious Containers catalog. Looks nice.”
Some neighbors directed their anger toward the Collectors, who they viewed as taking pleasure in the cryptic or, even worse, direct pronouncements of the Devices.
“Where do they get off?” asked a bitter neighbor. “Who said they were the only ones who could run the Devices?”
“Yeah,” added a neighbor. “What kind of person would even want that sick job – if they are even people, with that crazy makeup, those outfits…” the neighbor trailed off in evident disgust.
These were questions that had been asked before in other towns and other condominium buildings, to be sure, and the feeble replies were just as unsatisfying: “It’s just the way it’s always been.”
A few neighbors went so far as to wonder if the Collectors could somehow be responsible for the death, given the veracity and timeliness of the Machine’s prediction. “Makes you wonder alright,” said one neighbor to another while walking from the parking lot after a long day of work and commuting, the car radio chattering about the faraway madness of insane dictators. “Those Diagnoses, just how are they so right on all the time? Really makes you wonder…”
In fact, so befuddled were the neighbors by Janice’s death and the Collector’s peculiar visit (Bobby Jo was still known to pull alarmed neighbors aside, tugging at their elbows, saying “I saw him drink her blood!”) that James, cuckold and chemist and obvious suspect in his wife’s murder, might have gotten away with the crime had it not been for the attentive ministrations of Janice’s grieving paramour, Bruce Donaldson.
“She was too young,” said an unshaven Bruce, choking back a sob. “Too young.”
“I know buddy, I know,” said the neighbor Bruce rode with in the elevator. “My floor, okay? Take care of yourself, pal.”
“James had something to do with this, I fucking swear it!” Bruce growled later in the washroom, his sadness turned to anger.
The neighbor, sorting her whites and colors, looked at Bruce quizzically. “You really think so, Bruce? Maybe you’re overreacting. Thirty-six is so young though, and she was so fit. You really think James could do that? Geez, they had children together.”
“Goddamn right I do,” said Bruce, fuming. “Jeremy and Jacqueline are with Janice’s parents now. They couldn’t stand to be in the same room with that murderer.”
“Hmmm,” the neighbor said, feeding change into the machine.
And so rumors of James’s involvement in Janice’s death spread throughout Berkshire Commons and caught the attention of Freddy LeBouef, 5C, Homeowners’ Association Safety Subcommittee Chairman and local police sergeant. Freddy began to make discreet inquiries.
“Man, so sad about Janice McKendrick, huh? Poor thing. You knew her well?” Freddy asked a neighbor intently munching his corn-on-the-cob at a Saturday afternoon B&B (Barbecue and Badminton). The neighbor nodded as solemnly as a mouthful of corn would allow.
“What about James? You know him? How’s he holding up?” Freddy continued. The neighbor’s eyes narrowed, signifying disdain or at least profound misunderstanding.
James’s strange change in demeanor did nothing to ease the concerns of the neighbors. Depressed for so long, following his wife’s death James seemed to possess a newly meditative quality; he floated through the world of Berkshire Commons without care or concern.
James didn’t even make excuses for his non-attendance at volleyball, but took long walks on the nature path that circled Berkshire Commons, pausing to smell a flower or kick a pinecone. He sat in the middle of the adjoining soccer fields and recited strange archaic poetry. James was seen reading a book on chiropterology.
“It’s the study of bats,” Billy Jensen clarified for his confused father, who was relating the story to Billy’s mother, Doris.
“Bats?” Bob Jensen asked his son.
“Bats,” Billy repeated. “You know, the flying mammals.”
“Hmm,” Bob intoned and looked at Doris. Since receiving his own peculiar Diagnosis, Billy had grown somewhat withdrawn and devoted an increasing amount of time to reading nature texts. His parents were concerned.
“That’s very nice, honey,” said Doris. “Why don’t you go play outside and let Dad and me finish discussing the news.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Bob said quietly as Billy shut the door behind him, a book identifying various regional flora and fauna clasped in his hand.
“So,” Doris continued with her son safely out of hearing, “you’re saying the Device made James do it somehow?”
“Not that exactly,” Bob answered, taking a sip of his gin and tonic. “More like gave him the idea, you know?”
While Bob and Doris’s theory was not uncommon among the residents of Berkshire Commons, it seemed to most neighbors – those who didn’t put much sway in complicated metaphysics – in the case of the elliptical demise of Janice McKendrick, her husband James was the sole responsible party. Blaming the Collectors or the Diagnosis or the Device seemed as arbitrary as blaming the exercise machine, her lover Bruce Donaldson, or the cereal she ate each morning that her husband happened to poison.
When Freddy LeBouef had acquired an appropriate amount of circumstantial evidence and his colleagues in the police came to arrest James for the murder of Janice, he was strolling in the woods on one of his “constitutionals,” as he liked to describe them to any neighbor brave enough to ask how he was coping. He did not resist the officers.
Hands cuffed behind his back, James was led by the police past a throng of neighbors beside the barbecue pit. He shuffled along, head down – wracked by guilt and shame, the neighbors assumed. But then James stopped, tugging the two police officers who escorted him around and tightening his handcuffs to a painful degree to which he was wholly oblivious.
James raised his head, running a vacant gaze over the gaping neighbors, comfortably attired in their cargo shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. His dull eyes took in the barbecue pit, the sand volleyball court, the stacks of paper plates and plastic cups of plastic utensils next to bowls of coleslaw and baked beans in plastic containers on the faded red wood of the slatted picnic tables. He looked at all these things, a crystallized moment of his life in Berkshire Commons that he forever left behind when he saw the mountain in his dreams, and a wry smile formed on his lips. At the conclusion of his reverie, the placid look James had worn during the past weeks returned and he said quietly, “We needed her blood.” Not another syllable escaped his mouth until his death.
James’s last words were taken as a confession by the police and neighbors alike and his trial was a cursory affair – though there was an obvious unspoken reluctance to identify the plural “we” to whom he referred. In something of a departure from the country’s legal precedents, James’s Diagnosis, CHOKE, was even used against him by the prosecution. Given the likelihood of the death penalty for James’s crime – the country used the gas chamber as its means of execution – it was damning evidence.
Janice’s parents brought Jeremy and Jacqueline to the courtroom for the announcement of their father’s guilty verdict. The two children seemed at sea in their adult garb, two capsized orphans sitting astride the floating detritus of their lives. While the adults cheered, the children simply looked confused and, finally, resigned to their father’s new role in their subsequent dysfunction. When the bailiff took James away he did not look at his children or former in-laws, but remained in the blissful heat and wind of the hot desert of his imagination, where he had spent the entirety of his trial, each day a step closer to his release from the fetters of his current existence and rebirth in the caverns that ran red beneath the mountain.
The children moved permanently to live with their grandparents, and Bruce Donaldson moved on too, finding satisfaction with whiskey on his lips between the legs of a liquor-store attendant from across town. Bruce and Bernadette met a few short weeks after Janice’s murder; Bruce had developed a habit of booze-fueled voyeurism following Janice’s murder, a craving satiated by Bernadette’s place of employment and its proximity to Pablo’s Peep Palace. Neighbor Jack Johnson, of the quick poetic explanation of Billy Jensen’s Diagnosis, even occasionally accompanied Bruce on his sojourns to Pablo’s, a place with which Jack was already intimately acquainted.
The murderer James, preternaturally aware of what was to come, tried to hasten his journey across the desert by hanging himself in his cell on death row, but failed. The jury-rigged noose snapped and he fell to the floor of his cell, hitting his head against the latrine and fracturing his jaw and eye socket. He lay unconscious, choking to death on his own blood. On another day perhaps the guard might have seen James’s fall on the closed-circuit monitors and been able to save him from his fate until his later fate, but the accident happened the same night the deranged dictator from across the sea chose to make his momentous announcement.
All across the country, television broadcasts of Surveyor, Intern!, and Murder Science were interrupted by news bulletins of a short, balding man in military dress speaking vociferously in a foreign tongue. The up-to-the-second translation scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Tired of his enemy’s preeminent place in regional politics, its capitalist ideology and fantastic barbecues, the rotund potentate whose epaulets reached his ears chose that night to fire nuclear ballistic missiles at the country. The impact would come soon. As regrettable as it was for the despot to say, the inhabitants of the country should prepare for their inevitable demise. But alas, he added, they brought it on themselves.
In the weeks that followed, as the survivors crawled out from their caves and crude shelters to see the devastation firsthand and burn and bury the dead, it became clear that the Collectors had foreseen this most unlikely outcome. It was even thought the Collectors conspired to prevent just the type of collective knowledge that forewarned – if ineffectually – the residents of Berkshire Commons. The Collectors had apparently staggered the Diagnoses, leaving commonalities to isolated apartment buildings or blocks, but never whole towns or swaths of countryside. They were never dishonest per se – a Diagnosis was always correct – but with careful manipulation the Device’s operators managed a certain creative vocabulary. COLD became SLOW, INERTIA of cells dying in the FROST. HEAT was SPEED, as atoms, and skin, EXPLODED. The Collectors knew that while their skill with the Devices was highly valued, their product was also endlessly explained away or ignored; no one, save themselves and a few sage academics well versed in foreign policy, ever saw the country’s true fate coming.
Further word spread amongst ragtag bands of radioactive survivors that the Collectors had prepared for years, stockpiling supplies – including, some said, many thousands of liters of blood – in a vast series of underground caverns in the mountainous Western region of the country. Some surmised the Collectors had abducted a number of children, apprentices in blood, to repopulate the country in the Collectors’ own curious image: a race of seers, travelling the land in ghostly caravans. They had not only seen the coming apocalypse and done nothing to stop it, but had taken the opportunity to create a strange new Eden on the dusty soil of the old, dead world.
None of the children of Berkshire Commons had been so lucky to have been selected; many, however, did escape the fate their parents and neighbors suffered when one of the dictator’s warheads landed not far from the barbecue pit. The majority of school-age children – save Jeremy and Jacqueline, of course, having moved away – had been on the annual field trip to Stuckley Village, a historically accurate nineteenth-century community replete with a blacksmith shop, cobbler, and costumed townspeople.
With the dictator’s announcement, Stuckley Village’s intrepid staff broke policy and moved the children from the dormitory-style bunk-bed lodging in the Olde Cider Mill to the cement cellar of the Olde Meetinghouse – a historically inaccurate component of Stuckley Village allowed for the sake of “administrative necessity.” When the staff, forced by hunger and sanitation, eventually pushed away the rubble and saw the razed ground of their once proud village, many were driven insane by the historical incongruity that surrounded them – an unfortunate turn given the staff’s familiarity with pre-industrial means of production. The children were then forced to spread out, alone or in small packs, foraging the land for scraps of food and potable water.
Such was how Billy Jensen, son of Bob and Doris, found himself scrambling over cement blocks and debris when he recognized his surroundings. His mind and soul had aged many years in the few months since he had last looked upon Berkshire Commons, but there was no doubt he was home. Thinking of his dead parents and neighbors, vaporized in white FIRE when the missiles hit, Billy Jensen looked up at the slate-colored sky. He pulled his tattered coat around his shoulders and shivered. The long WINTER had begun.
WINTER was first published in 2019 in Shooter Magazine.
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